A Catholic right turn on immigration's moral high road: Tim Rutten

The House Republicans last week consigned comprehensive immigration reform to the same ideological abyss where rational federal firearms regulation already has gone to die.

Their refusal to take up the comprehensive reform bill passed by a bipartisan coalition in the Senate reflects the continued legislative veto exercised by ideologically rigid members associated with the GOP's Tea Party factions and the brutal political arithmetic that is inexorably transforming the Republicans into what amounts to the national white people's party with its center of gravity in the old Confederacy.The House conservatives from that region can afford to ignore the pleas of the national party's senior leaders -- like former President George W. Bush -- and pander to their narrow base because gerrymandering has given them safe seats. As the American Prospect's Harold Meyerson pointed out this week, only 38 of the 234 House Republicans represent districts with populations of at least 20 percent Latinos -- and 12 of those are in California.

That's the purely political consideration at work when GOP lawmakers like Iowa's Rep. Steve King say, as he did this week, that comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship would only help "elites who want cheap labor, Democratic power brokers, and those who hire illegal labor. . .. It would hurt Republicans, and I don't think you can make an argument otherwise. Two out of every three of the new citizens would be Democrats."

Into this melancholy mix of inflexible ideology and cynical political calculation comes a strange, and in many ways confounding, new book, "Immigration and the Next America" by Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez, who also chairs the American episcopate's Committee on Immigration. It goes without saying that the current crop of U.S. prelates has managed to shred most of the moral authority the bishops have wielded in American politics since the New Deal. When it comes to sexual ethics, the pedophilia scandal, along with continued opposition to marriage equality and contraception, has pretty much taken the bishops out of the game. After generations of providing clear and far-sighted leadership on society's health care obligations, their dog-in-the-manger opposition to President Barack Obama's landmark reform package has managed to do the same. If the archbishop's book signals a turn by the bishops on immigration, then something similar is about to occur on this issue -- and that's a tragedy.

Gomez's book takes its title from another tract, "The Next America," a denunciation of the country's alleged drift into a secularism overtly hostile to religious freedom. Its author, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, is a leader among those bishops implicitly, but relentlessly suggesting that "faithful" Catholics cannot belong to the Democratic Party. As a cleric who owes his spiritual formation to his long membership and education in Opus Dei, an organization fundamentally shaped by its origins in Franco's Spain, it's no surprise that Gomez is an instinctual social and political conservative. His book, in fact, grows out of talks he gave at the Napa Institute, which was founded by a wealthy and conservative Orange County Catholic layman, Tim Busch. As such, it's a novel attempt to make the case for immigration reform according to the values and historical fantasies popular on the American right.

If that sounds like something of a shotgun marriage, it's because ... well, it is.

"Over the past few years," Gomez writes, "I've talked to many Americans, and I've listened carefully to their arguments against immigration. I have to say: I have a lot of sympathy for point of view. I understand why they want to build more walls to secure our borders. I agree when they say we should look more closely at who we let into our country. Opponents of immigration are trying to express something admirable and patriotic. They are trying to defend this country they love."

That's a sentiment sure to be appreciated by the "patriots" who blocked immigration reform in the House last week.

Elsewhere, the archbishop expresses understanding for the view that undocumented migrants simply are lawbreakers. "The presence in our midst of millions of unauthorized immigrants offends something deep in our American self-understanding. The chaos that illegal immigration has caused in some of our southern border communities only adds to a general feeling of lawlessness. The thought that these immigrants might go unpunished or win some kind of amnesty strikes at our basic sensibilities of justice and fair play."

Really? Perhaps, but only in those right-wing circles where "the rule of law" is tortured into a concept of criminality that equates flight from dire economic necessity with theft and murder.

The real stumbling blocks here, Gomez argues, are -- believe it not -- secularization and multiculturalism: "Many of our leaders today -- in government, higher education, media and culture -- express frank hostility toward religious people and their aspirations and institutions ... Indeed, many of our leaders and educators seem to reject the idea that there are common 'American' values or duties that should be taught or expected of citizens and others living here. I sense that many opponents of immigration reform 'get' this negative drift in our civic consciousness and public morality ..."

Suffice to say that this intellectual train wreck of a book ultimately makes the argument that properly regulated immigration will help roll back the corrosive secular and multicultural tide. Enough said.

Paradoxically, Gomez's book is dedicated to Pope Francis as "an immigrant's son." Yet it's hard to find anything as distinct from the tone of "Immigration and the Next America" as the pontiff's own statement on immigration last week.

Francis made a virtually impromptu visit to the tiny Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, where many economic immigrants and asylum-seekers fleeing North Africa by boat have found themselves stranded short of their hoped for European refuge. The pope had read of a dozen migrants who drowned when their rickety boat sank short of the island, and he placed a wreath at the site of their deaths in commemoration not just of this tragedy, but of the thousands of others who have perished seeking what he later called "a more dignified life" for themselves and their families.

In what was described as a "fiercely worded homily" at a Mass afterward, Francis asked, "Has any of us wept for these persons who were on the boat? For the young mothers carrying their babies? For these men who were looking for a means of supporting their families? We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion."

That's the sort of plain-spoken humane witness that already has made Francis the only international figure of moral authority delivering a cogent criticism of unrestrained consumer capitalism, the heedless globalization of the world's economy and the developed world's hardening indifference to the Southern Hemisphere's poverty and underdevelopment.

It's the sort of socially realistic and morally cogent leadership the Catholic bishops have -- up until now -- provided on immigration reform. It's a perplexing shame to see it frittered away in what last week's events in the House show will ultimately be a vain attempt to win over hearts that, indeed, seem to have forgotten how to weep.